Insights on Coaching and Mentoring Children

Coaching a child requires you to nurture and cultivate the child’s ability of a task or a skill. However, mentoring a child means you nurture and cultivate their intent towards living life. For instance, your child has a talent and aptitude for public speaking. As a coach, you will teach the child the skill and technique of speech, body language and content, etc. As a mentor however you might share your experience of how public speaking affected you as a person, the highs and lows that it brought you and how it helped evolving you as a person.

Often the roles of a mentor and coach become intermingled. Like in the movie ‘Karate Kid’, Jackie Chan as the martial arts coach commands his young student to spend days putting on and taking off his jacket in a detailed sequence of moves till the kid gets rid of his aggression and submits to the teacher-student relationship.

For a parent it is natural to coach and mentor your children. Most of us do it without realizing the enormous potential of personal growth these roles offers.

Here are some useful insights for those who wish to be more deliberate and effective as coaches and mentors for their children:

1. You’re the beneficiary of the relationship

Reflection for the leader is action for the subordinate and action for the subordinate is reflection for the leader. Know that in a parent child relationship, YOU are the foremost beneficiary. It may seem paradoxical but the relationship only becomes fruitful in producing excellence and maturity if you realise that your upper hand over your child is meant for you to serve the child  and for your receptive learning that comes from a deep, deep respect towards the child. It’s like the martial arts guru bowing to the protégé for what the protégé unknowingly brings to the teacher for the teacher’s growth.

This statement brings a host of implications to our demeanour if we begin to understand its profoundness. When you realise you’re the ‘project’ before the children you will for instance not react and pounce on a child’s apparent lapse at something. You will in fact ‘receive’ the situation, munch on it, work out where you can remedy the root cause in yourself or help the child to see how the lapse can be disruptive.

Our children continue to teach us invaluable lessons everyday… provided we accept their teachings.

2. Trust your Instinct

Parents specially mothers are equipped with a natural instinct towards rearing the children. As a parent-mentor it’s very important to make use of this instinct. Know that if you pay attention to your child and to your own surroundings, you will notice enough to rear your child. The thing to remember however is to be mindful and fully conscious. For example it’s usually very easy to pick out correctly a wailing infant’s problem and to remedy it if you are mindful, attuned and relaxed. Likewise, if you are confused about which school or subject specialization to pick for your child, learn to switch off the mind’s litany and ask your heart to help you. Often in a state of mindfulness, a school’s environment, a teacher’s remark or your child’s inclination will close the matter for you. The ‘silencing the inner dialogue’ exercise is particularly helpful in becoming mindful.

As a parent, you will also notice that very young children have a natural instinct too. I have found that when my children vehemently avoid a certain food or fervently wish for a day off from school, it’s a good idea to let them follow their heartfelt desire. Ironically, in the pursuit of our competitive ideals and in the clatter of techno gadgets we not only lose our connection with our sixth sense but also make our children distant from their heart’s voice.

3. Watch the children

As a coach or a mentor it’s essential that you know what your child’s doing in a given day. So like managers must watch the game, parents too must watch the children by spending time with them. From my experience, the more time I spent with my infants, the easier it was to make a routine of their day, the easier it was to align their biological cycles to nature’s day-night cycle.

As children grow older, you would not need to spend more time with them but would definitely need to know what they’re up to in order to see the growth opportunities that arise from their activities.

4. Tailor their growth opportunity from their routine

When you watch your children’s routine, you will know what they’re struggling with and work out the growth opportunities from their routine. As mentors you can teach children valuable life skills from their own environment. You can help them deal with bullies and sibling rivalry, encourage an appreciation of art, nature and beauty and avoid aggression just by reinforcing the right stimuli around them.

For instance, a simple exercise of remembering the pleasant events of the day and feeling thankful towards them will reinforce a sense of gratitude in young minds that is so essential for a creative thinking process.

Unknowingly we can sow the seeds of greatness in children by helping them to see wonderful opportunities to contribute from within their seemingly mundane routine. For instance, Edhi gives the example of how his mother gave him two coins everyday as he would go to school and tell him to spend one wisely on charity and one on himself. As he got older she asked him to help those injured or ill with medicines and got feedback on what he did. Little did she know that she was raising a man who would become a leading light of social work in Asia!

5. Empower the Reflective Process

The crux of a coaching/ mentoring relationship is to make yourself dispensable. The basis of your relationship with your child should be to empower them to think for themselves and act appropriately to the moment. That is why laying down rules for a young mind without explaining the basis to distinguish between the right and wrong can lead to immense confusion later on as it cripples a child’s sense of inference and deduction.

(Inspired from Leadership: The Care and Growth Model by Etsko Schuitema)